Buy, Open, Hope, Repeat

On February 27, 2026, Pokémon hit its 30-year mark. Three decades of pocket monsters, shiny cardboard, and a fanbase that somehow spans kids, millennials, and now their kids too.

This anniversary lands at a very specific moment. Not just for Pokémon, but for the entire TCG space.

Trading cards are loud again. Mainstream media is covering record auctions. Celebrities are flexing slabs on Instagram. What used to be a niche hobby is now brushing up against mainstream culture again.

Here’s the part people keep missing.

TCGs are not some new meta. They predate the internet. Long before anyone knew what a blockchain was, people were already gathering around tables, ripping open booster packs, and trading cards with strangers. So when people talk about the intersection of TCG and crypto like it’s some experimental crossover, I see two cultures that were always compatible.

And that simple fact might be the most bullish signal for where TCG and crypto intersect next.

TCG Is Bigger Than Just Pokemon

When most people hear “TCG,” their mind immediately goes to Pokemon. While Pokemon is undeniably the biggest name in the room, equating TCG to just Pokemon is, frankly, shallow.

This space is layered.

• Yu-Gi-Oh! has been grinding competitive circuits since 2002. Real tournaments, real prize pools, a scene that has outlived most esports titles.

• One Piece Card Game, launched in 2022, didn’t grow slowly. It detonated. Print runs consistently sell out across Asia and North America.

• Magic: The Gathering, the grandfather of them all, has been running strong since 1993 and still holds one of the most active secondary markets in all of collectibles.

What’s more interesting is who’s entering the arena now.

Celebrities aren’t just doing paid promos. They’re collecting, grading, flexing pulls, showing up at events. When high-profile names enter organically, it usually signals that a culture has moved from niche hobby to mainstream asset class.

We've seen this move before. Celebrities entered NFTs too. They bought sky-high priced PFPs, flexed them on Twitter, showed them off in interviews. At the time, it felt like mainstream adoption.

However, in 2022, a proposed class action lawsuit accused Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Bieber, and other celebrities of fraud over their promotion of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. The claim was that these celebrities never bought the NFTs with their own money. They were allegedly gifted or received them directly from MoonPay or Yuga Labs as hidden payment for promoting the collection, while publicly posting as if they had purchased them themselves.

By 2023, The Block reported that MoonPay had gifted free or heavily discounted BAYC NFTs to several celebrities for promotional purposes. In hindsight, it was the peak.

TCG feels different. We grew up watching animation like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! And One Piece, saving up pocket money to buy booster packs, trading cards with friends at school. Those memories carry a weight that a JPEG on a screen simply cannot replicate.

What's happening now is more than just a celebrity trend. These cards are no longer childhood souvenirs. They function as recognized stores of value, traded with the same seriousness as vintage watches or blue-chip paintings.

The End of An Era

On Feb 28, CEO of Magic Eden, Jack, made an announcement that few saw coming.

The platform is shutting down support for its EVM marketplace and Bitcoin (Runes & Ordinals) marketplace on March 9th. Its Bitcoin API will follow on March 27th, and the Magic Eden Wallet will be discontinued on April 1st. Going forward, Magic Eden will focus on just two things: their Solana marketplace and their new crypto casino.

It is the end of an era.

TCG is Sprouting

Jack's tweet was pretty straightforward.

Magic Eden was once the go-to marketplace across multiple chains. They expanded aggressively into Ethereum, Polygon, and Bitcoin during the NFT boom, betting that a multi-chain approach would capture the broadest audience. Now, they're cutting back.

In Jack's own words, 80% of their costs were tied to products generating only 20% of their revenue. The decision was to wind those down, refocus on their Solana roots, retain their most profitable products, and go deep on crypto entertainment.

It's a significant restructuring. But look at where they chose to double down, and the picture starts to make sense. The onchain TCG card ecosystem lives primarily on Solana.

This also puts Magic Eden's pivot into perspective. They already support pack ripping, where users can purchase and open digital booster packs onchain. Whether this is enough to save a platform that has been struggling with declining volume and user trust is another question entirely. However, the direction they're choosing to move in is telling.

The DOPAMINE Effect

Pack ripping. Blind boxes. NFT reveals. On the surface, they look like different products for different audiences. Strip them down, and they all share one thing in common: dopamine.

The anticipation before you tear open a booster pack. The rush when you pull a rare card. The immediate urge to open another one. That loop is undeniably one of the reasons TCG players keep coming back. It's the same reason people line up outside Pop Mart stores, paying resale premiums just for the chance to open a box and pull a rare Labubu figure.

Buy, open, hope, repeat.

It's why NFT reveal mechanics worked so well during the bull market. The mint was never just about the art. It was about the moment. Watching your metadata load. Waiting to see if you got a rare trait. That hit of excitement is universal.

Magic Eden building a casino alongside a marketplace where pack ripping thrives may be less of a strategic masterstroke and more of a survival play. The platform has seen better days. Regardless of how it plays out for them, the bet itself reveals something important: the dopamine-driven mechanics of opening, revealing, and collecting are where the attention and engagement still exist.

And that leads to the biggest point of all.

The audience already exists. Millions of people around the world already collect cards, already rip packs, already line up for blind boxes. They understand scarcity and value. They don't need to be educated on why a rare pull is worth more than a common one. They've been living it.

What the NFT industry has been praying for, struggling for, and spending millions of marketing dollars trying to achieve, these communities have been doing effortlessly for years.

The user base is already there. The only step left is moving it onchain.

Scarcity Never Died

The narrative around NFTs has shifted from "the future of digital ownership" to "is it dead?"

But that doesn't mean the underlying idea was wrong. Digital ownership, verifiable scarcity, global secondary markets. These concepts still hold real value.

TCG never had to convince anyone to collect. The trading card game industry is not waiting for Web3 to validate it. It has the audience, the culture, the dopamine loop, and now, increasingly, the onchain infrastructure to match.

The bridge between Web2 and Web3 that everyone has been looking for might not come from a new protocol, a new token, or a new social platform.

It might just come from a booster pack.

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